The last thing Sony wants is another $600.00 price tag and a machine that is difficult to manufacture. I'm sure both Sony and Microsoft are listening, but they are trying to balance performance and cost.

Sony believed that price wouldn't matter as much as performance in the current generation of counsels and it cost them market share. What ended up happening in many cases is that games were developed on the XBOX 360 because it had a larger install base. A port was then made over to the PS3. This meant that the extra performance the PS3 has was rarely utilized in 3rd party titles. When you compare these titles side by side, there is little difference, even though on paper the PS3 has more impressive specs then the XBOX 360.

I expect that the initial price for the next gens will be around $400 to $450. Having good games available early on will matter also. Epic will have something like Unreal towards the launch date, which I expect to be in Q3 2014. I wouldn't expect to hear anything solid from either Sony or Microsoft until Q1 2014. I also suspect that instead of a E3 revel, it will be a MTV / G4 "special" announcing the arrival. Neither company can risk having their announcement drowned out at E3.